Congratulations to DOM faculty members, Sivasubramanium Bhavani, MD, MS (Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine), and Michael Woodworth, MD, MSc, FIDSA (Infectious Diseases), on being named 2024 ASCI Young Physician Awardees! The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognizes up to 50 physician-scientists annually who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research. Read more on the award.

About the awardees

Sivasubramanium Bhavani, MD, MS 

Sivasubramanium Bhavani, MD, MS, is a physician-scientist and an assistant professor of Medicine at Emory University in the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, Critical Care, and Sleep Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency at Baylor College of Medicine, and a Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he concurrently completed a T32 research fellowship and a Master of Science in Public Health. Dr. Bhavani’s research program focuses on a question that has hindered sepsis management for decades: “How do we move from a one-size-fits-all approach to a precision medicine approach to treating sepsis?” The proposed solution is to deconstruct the heterogenous syndrome of sepsis into distinct subphenotypes, each with potentially different responses to different treatments. Dr. Bhavani’s research centers on identifying these treatment-responsive sepsis subphenotypes by applying machine learning algorithms to routine bedside vital signs that are available even in low-resource settings.

Dr. Bhavani’s work has received support from the American Thoracic Society, NIGMS, NSF, and the AI Humanity Initiative at Emory University. His work on temperature and vital signs in sepsis has led to first-author publications in JAMA, Intensive Care Medicine, American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, and CHEST. Through his K23, Dr. Bhavani has developed the vitals trajectory subphenotypes, the first-ever discovery of a precision medicine approach to crystalloid fluid resuscitation in patients with sepsis. The algorithm is being implemented as a clinical decision support tool in the electronic medical record across the Emory Healthcare system to prospectively study the effect of a precision medicine approach to fluid resuscitation in patients with sepsis. Dr. Bhavani’s vision is to translate the machine learning algorithms developed in his lab from paper to practice, and to evaluate the implementation-effectiveness of these algorithms in guiding precision treatment and improving the outcomes of critically ill patients.

Want to learn about Dr. Bhavani’s past DOM research? Check out his DOM Research Spotlight HERE.

Michael Woodworth, MD, MSc, FIDSA 

Michael Woodworth, MD, MSc, FID SA, has the long-term goal of translating and expanding understanding of microbial ecology and metagenomics into novel microbiome therapies for patients with antimicrobial resistant bacterial colonization and infection. He helped to conduct the first randomized clinical trial of fecal microbiota transplantation in renal transplant recipients that was published in Science Translational Medicine and is leading two additional FMT translational clinical trials. As an infectious disease physician scientist, Dr. Woodworth’s research program spans translational metagenomic data science, small clinical trials, and clinical epidemiology. His work has been supported by competitive funding from the Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance, the Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG), the Southern Society for Clinical Investigation, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Want to learn about Dr. Woodworth’s past DOM research? Check out his DOM Research Spotlight HERE.